Traffic to UK Pirate Party Website Skyrockets After TPB Block

Earlier this month, five ISPs across the UK were ordered to block subscribers from accessing popular file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay. Though the intention was to remove people's ability to visit the Pirate Bay, one source at TBP spoke anonymously about how the block actually resulted in a massive boost in traffic for the site. Now it seems that surge in traffic is extending to the UK's Pirate Party.

TorrentFreak reports that in response to the news that The Pirate Bay had been blocked by ISPs across the country, Pirate Party UK set up a proxy to help people circumvent the blocks put in place. The Party's proxy was then features as the number one recommended service on PirateReverse. iAs a result of this prominent placement, traffic to the Pirate Party UK site has risen a tremendous amount.

"Whenever the government tries to break the Internet we get a massive boost," a PPUK Culture & Media spokesperson is quoted as telling TorrentFreak.

According to PPUK, during a single 24 hour period last week, the site received more than 1.8m hits and Alexa now ranks them as the UK's 1,550th most popular website. Three weeks ago, their ranking was outside of 1000.

Perhaps they'll eventually learn that they can't use such blunt and indiscriminate tools as legal enforcements to try and block aspects of the internet with which they disagree. If they have a problem, they need to use the democratic process to appeal to the culture of the internet, and if that democracy is unsuccessful for them, then they need to learn that it is not within their remit to use brute force and legal brunt to achieve their desires.

So far, 2 complete website blackouts. Is this not but two steps to another Chinese firewall, and media censorship on a broad nationwide scale?

Though it's better to go for the distributors of the pirated material than the millions of users that acquire that material, as it's more efficient and effective. A block is aiming at the users, whilst taking Piratebay down completely, would be the distribution (I know they don't host the material, it's just the users, but they host the tracker that links all the users, lose that and it's a lot harder to exchange the material).